Online Teilnahme:

https://zoom.us/j/95603412698?pwd=lWi9j5gEC1WV5VKIx8RbQOYKsaCJIQ.1

Meeting-ID: 956 0341 2698
Kenncode: 135860
 

Prof. Dr. David Pretel (CSIC)

Wild Rubber in the Industrial Age: A Global History of Production

Abstract
This presentation outlines the main arguments and research directions of WILDHIST, a European Research Council Consolidator Grant that I have been recently awarded. The project investigates the hypothesis that wild rubber industries in the tropical rainforests of Africa and Latin America were key sites in the broader dynamics of industrialisation and scientific research from the early 19th century to the Second World War, forming an integral part of the era’s expanding global networks of knowledge exchange.
The project rethinks and rewrites the global history of rubber production in non-plantation contexts and will provide a better conceptual and empirical understanding of tropical commodities, encouraging broad audiences to view rainforests as anthropogenic landscapes and to reconsider both what constitutes a “wild” nature and the dichotomy between “natural” and “industrial” materials. The project will also expand our knowledge of wild rubber technologies and expertise. This will matter not only to historians but also to local communities, as it reshapes discourse on the knowledge possessed by forest populations and their relationship with nature.

CV
David Pretel is Senior Distinguished Researcher at the Institute of History, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant WILDHIST. He is a historian of Latin America and the Atlantic World, with a focus on the history of science and technology, economic history, and environmental history. He studied at the Autonomous University of Madrid and the University of Cambridge, and was a visiting graduate student at the Universities of Bristol, California (Los Angeles, UCLA), and Nottingham. He has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, King’s College London, El Colegio de México, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
He is the author of Institutionalising Patents in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Palgrave, 2018) and co-editor of The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy (Cambridge, 2015), Technology and Globalization: Networks of Experts in World History (Palgrave, 2018), and Colours, Commodities, and the Birth of Globalization (Bloomsbury, 2024). His work has appeared in the journals History of Science, Technology and Culture, Business History, and Global Environment, as well as in volumes such as The Oxford Handbook of Commodity History and The Cambridge History of Technology.

More information: www.davidpretel.com